Thursday, 13 April 2017

A Family Story Worth Telling: The Durrells of Corfu

Libby Purves reviews The Durrells of Corfu in The Daily Mail.Any family is a tapestry: woven into its
history are flaws, tragedies and adventures, glittering fictions and
jokes enlivening the solid texture of fact and the rips and darns of
wider historic events.

Family stories
are worth telling, and this one is fascinatingly put together by Michael
Haag. For few families present such an entertaining patchwork tale as
the Durrells, three of whose members were writers.

The
eldest was celebrated novelist Lawrence (Larry) Durrell, who wrote the
Alexandria Quartet and the glorious spoof Antrobus stories of diplomatic
life.

The baby of the family was the
naturalist and founder of Jersey Zoo Gerald Durrell, beloved for tales
of collecting specimens in Africa and his memoir of their years in
Corfu, My Family And Other Animals (which inspired the current ITV
series starring Keeley Hawes).

Their
sister Margo, teasingly portrayed as a girlish airhead by her brother,
but, in fact, a resolute woman, had her own memoir published in 1995.

Haag draws on all these writings,
but casts sidelights on the characters (two, at least, were mischievous
exaggerators) and covers the more sober parts of their history before
Corfu, using diaries, letters, friends and unpublished notes.

Reading
about the harder bits, you admire their loyalty, rackety, harmless
squabbles, exasperated tolerance and, above all, an unspoken bond of
care for a fond, but fragile mother.

The baby of the Durrell family
was the naturalist and founder of Jersey Zoo Gerald Durrell, beloved for
tales of collecting specimens in Africa and his memoir of their years
in Corfu, My Family And Other Animals (which inspired the current ITV
series starring Keeley Hawes)

They
were a colonial family living in the beauty and harshness of India in
the Twenties. Louisa, the mother, lost one baby to diphtheria and gave
birth to the next in a cholera epidemic; there was the risk of
snakebite, poison, rabies, leprosy and yellow fever.

She
had long periods of looking after children alone amid the hot scents,
jungle sounds and soft-footed servants while her husband built railways.

There
were also two pet Himalayan bear cubs. The young Gerry remembered:
‘Having our own bears was a wonderful thing, even though they did smell
very lavatorial.’

Larry was away at
school by then, but Margo and their other brother Leslie would overturn
the bears’ basket and shout: ‘Mother, the bears are out!’

Louisa would run to save baby Gerry, who’d be busy grubbing in the dirt for slugs even then.

The
children would eat random berries, necessitating a visit from Dr
Chakravati on his old bicycle to say: ‘What is the trouble today dear
lady... Oh dear dear, castor oil must be given to all!’

Leslie,
the second son, was dosed with chicken’s blood, tonsils were removed in
a scrubbed dining room, while Margo relied on a secret bottle of holy
water from Lourdes, given to her by a devout governess, to stave off ill
health.

But in 1928, their father died. Louisa, heartbroken, contemplated suicide.

They
returned to an England they hardly knew; first London, then
Bournemouth. Left mainly alone with little Gerry, Louisa took to drink.

At one point in 1932 she vanished and his notes mention a ‘nervous breakdown and rest cure’.

This
crisis is never mentioned in the memoirs, but is one reason the family
moved to Corfu. Also, Gerry had been slapped at school and was removed
aged nine, never to go again. Larry may have tired, too, of London life,
where he ‘hymned and whored... playing jazz in a nightclub, working in
real estate, tried everything’.

There
he met his first wife, Nancy Myers, an art school dropout, who reported
that he ‘dramatised everything — mad mother, ridiculous children, mother
drunk throwing fortune to the winds, hellish, foolish, stupid woman...
beetles in the soup’.

Mother, in turn, threw her out of the Bournemouth house after finding them in bed: ‘I’m not having Gerry corrupted.’

Two weeks later, she welcomed Nancy back again and fed her delicious curries.

Gerald
defended himself, as the baby of the family always will, with bursts of
outrage. When his eldest brother emptied a sink full of interesting
marine life in order to shave, he cried: ‘You — you — you AUTHOR, you!’

The
Corfu years are told in My Family And Other Animals and, while
characters are familiar — their Greek protector Spiro, Theodore the
naturalist, George the tutor — Haag adds some useful modifications.

The
family arrived in poor health and Louisa’s drinking was worry-ing. It
was a tough paradise at first — they did not speak Greek and had trouble
getting money sent.

The
Durrells were not members of the professional or officer classes and
were certainly not gentry. They associated with the peasants and
villagers in a way that offended both those below and above their
station... they did not fit.

A
few neighbours were agreeably eccentric — unpublished writings reveal
one man who kept the skull of his former mistress on his desk, and a
lady who stored empty tin cans in a native Indian canoe hung from the
ceiling.

But not everyone took to the
Durrells. Larry and Nancy’s nude swimming shocked the local church so
much that young men threw stones. A fellow expat describes them as
noisy, shouting ‘clowns’ who scandalised the established Brits of Corfu.

‘The
Durrells were not members of the professional or officer classes and
were certainly not gentry. They associated with the peasants and
villagers in a way that offended both those below and above their
station... they did not fit.’

War in 1939 drove them back to England. Margo tried to ‘stick it out with her Greek friends’, but finally fled.

In
the bombing of Corfu, Spiro’s parents were killed and the town
flattened. Back home, the young men were conscripted (Gerald was sent to
work on the land) and Margo, as a single mother, took in lodgers in
Bournemouth.

She mentions that her
youngest brother still marked his territory ‘not with musk and urine,
but with a marmoset, which happily did both for him’.

This book marks out the Durrells’ territory in the fine, bold history of British bohemianism.

About Me

I am a writer, historian and biographer who lives in London, England. My books are published by Yale University Press, Profile Books, Harper Collins, The American University in Cairo Press, and others. Also see my website.